Re: [tlug] Japanese Encoding - which one?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Brett" == Brett Robson <b-robson@example.com> writes:

    Brett> I certainly don't need a lecture from you what my job is.

You didn't, and won't, get one.  But whatever it is, please do it
responsibly.

    Brett> My job is to help provide communication for Japan not 国際
    Brett> 化. As for being part of the "problem", telling others to
    Brett> upgrade their MUA is an arrogance people outside academia
    Brett> can't afford.

Oh, c'mon.  The people who aren't going to change MUAs in order to
conform to standards are the same folks who are forced to upgrade by
their vendors all the time.  Arrogance is no way limited to academics.
And how about your industry?  There are plenty of ISPs who will tell
you they don't support Linux etc. (or there were a couple years ago),
or that they don't support Windows 3.1/95/98 anymore, etc.

Nor did I tell you to tell anybody to upgrade.  What I told you is
"don't claim that the RFCs support your pragmatic decision to do
what's easy for your customers".

    Brett> Advancing the state of the art is the job of academics and
    Brett> industry bodies;

Sure, but that's just academic until the users adopt it.  You may not
be able to usefully encourage your users to improve their MUAs, but
that's no reason to discourage TLUGgers from using UTF-8 with
disinformation.

As I admitted, the fact that most of the vendors in Japan are not
interested in becoming standards-compatible is useful to people who
want to set their outgoing MIME charset and forget it.  But there are
plenty of people who _want_ to be part of the solution, and not a few
who _need_ a solution to problems that RFC 1468 was not intended to
address.

    Brett> BTW I have actually helped Lyle and several others here.

Nothing wrong with that.  You should do it more often.<wink>


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